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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare branding and communications expert with more than 25 years of industry experience. and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also worked extensively healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

While they have great potential, healthcare AI technologies are still at the exploration stage in most healthcare organizations. However, here and there AI is already making a concrete difference for hospitals, and the following is one example.

According to an article in Internet Health Management, one community hospital located in St. Augustine, Florida expects to save $20 million dollars over the next the three years thanks to its AI investments.

Not long ago, 335-bed Flagler Hospital kicked off a $75,000 pilot project dedicated to improving the treatment of pneumonia, sepsis and other high mortality conditions, building on AI tools from vendor Ayasdi Inc.

Michael Sanders, a physician who serves as chief medical informatics officer for the hospital, told the publication that the idea was to “let the data guide us.” “Our ability to rapidly construct clinical pathways based on our own data and measure adherence by our staff to those standards provides us with the opportunity to deliver better care at a lower cost to our patients,” Sanders told IHM.

The pilot, which took place over just nine weeks, reviewed records dating back five years. Flagler’s IT team used Ayasdi’s tools to analyze data held in the hospital’s Allscripts EHR, including patient records, billing, and administrative data. Analysts looked at data on patterns of care, lengths of stay and patient outcomes, including the types of medications docs and for prescribing and when doctors were ordering CT scans.

After analyzing the data, Sanders and his colleagues used the AI tools to build guidelines into the Allscripts EHR, which Sanders hoped would make it easy for physicians to use them.

The project generated some impressive results. For example, the publication reported, pathways for pneumonia treatment resulted in $1,336 in administrative savings for a typical hospital stay and cut down lengths of stay by two days. All told, the new approach cut administrative costs for pneumonia treatment by $800,000.

Given the success of the project, the hospital expects to expand the scope of its future efforts. At the outset of the project, Sanders had expected to use AI tools to take on 12 conditions, but given the initial success with rolling out AI-based pathways, Sanders now plans to take on one condition each month, with an eye on meeting a goal of generating $20 million in savings over the new few years, he told IHM.

Flagler is not the first, nor will it be the last, hospital to streamline care using AI. For another example, check out the efforts underway at Montefiore Health, which seems to be transforming its entire data infrastructure to support AI-based analytics efforts.